A banner with a picture of Lech Kaczynski.CreditCreditRafal Milach for The New York Times

Feature

The Party That Wants to Make Poland Great Again

In just a year, Law and Justice has shown how a far-right nationalist government in Europe really governs — and how far it can push the limits of democracy.

A banner with a picture of Lech Kaczynski.CreditCreditRafal Milach for The New York Times

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By James Traub

Nov. 2, 2016

Last May, Poland’s ruling Law and Justice Party, a right-wing nationalist party committed to upending Poland’s established liberal order, convened an “audit” of the previous government in the high-Modernist Parliament building in Warsaw. Since winning a decisive electoral victory in October 2015, Law and Justice had set about dismantling many of the structural checks and balances designed to prevent a return to the authoritarianism of the Soviet era. The audit, called with little advance warning, was intended to discredit Civic Platform, the centrist, pro-European party that ruled Poland from 2007 to 2015.

It was a strangely knockabout inquisition. “They didn’t even give us any documents to read or respond to,” Rafal Trzaskowski, the former minister of European affairs, who testified at the audit, told me when I visited him in his office two days later. “Each minister just got up and made accusations.” The Law and Justice prime minister, Beata Szydlo, kicked off the audit by claiming that Civic Platform had squandered 340 billion zlotys ($88 billion) through waste. Trzaskowski listened in amazement as one of Szydlo’s colleagues accused an unnamed Civic Platform minister of using a state discount to buy an iPhone for less than the retail price.

The foreign minister, Witold Waszczykowski, declared that Civic Platform had sold out Poland’s national interests to the European Union. The defense minister, Antoni Macierewicz, in a speech that lasted for more than an hour, claimed that under Civic Platform, Poland’s military-and-intelligence officials had been doing Russia’s bidding — perhaps, he conceded, unknowingly — and presented a photograph that he said showed Polish intelligence officers playfully donning Russian navy caps at a gathering in St. Petersburg. Trzaskowski was shocked. “He was saying that leading ministers and generals had betrayed Poland,” he told me. “I was dumbfounded. I had to smoke a cigarette, and I don’t even smoke.”

After she left the lectern, Szydlo stopped to receive a congratulatory embrace from a short, stocky man sitting immediately to the right of the lectern: Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the founder, guide and master of the Law and Justice Party. The grayest of eminences, Kaczynski holds no government post. Yet neither allies nor enemies doubt that Kaczynski runs Poland; he did not speak during the audit, but it was plainly his affair. To Trzaskowski, the entire spectacle appeared to have been engineered for the benefit of the supremo, who occasionally beamed with delight as the allegations unfurled.

Poland has been the great success story of the former Eastern bloc, a nation that rapidly adopted democratic norms and moved toward a free-market economy after the fall of communism in 1989. But over the last year Kaczynski and his followers have moved with astonishing speed to alter this trajectory, in hopes of deflecting Poland from the orbit of Western Europe and returning it to a past defined by family, church and home. In its first months in power, the new government moved swiftly to gain control over the country’s public media, its Civil Service and its judiciary, and it has largely neutralized the Constitutional Tribunal, the nation’s highest court. The European Union, in a rare rebuke, accused Law and Justice of undermining the rule of law; Kaczynski told the E.U. to mind its own business.

Law and Justice’s particular resentments, above all its virulent anti-Communism in the absence of actual Communists, may be distinctly Polish. But in its revolt against European liberalism, the party stands at the forefront of a growing movement. The one unifying feature of Western democracies today is the rise of nativist, nationalist parties. All of them tap a deep and thickening vein of pessimism about the economic and political prospects of the West. In part their ascent reflects the aftershocks of the financial crisis of 2007-2008, which shook the faith of many working-class and middle-class voters in the wisdom of liberal elites. The continuing refugee crisis has also provoked a fierce backlash against newcomers in many countries. And anxieties about a globalized world have created a bull market in nostalgia.

These are the fears that carried the day in the Brexit vote and that propelled Donald Trump to the Republican nomination. As the largest country in the West to have elected one of these authoritarian-minded parties to power, Poland may be a harbinger. Radoslaw Markowski, a leading political scientist, told me that he had begun to have an awful premonition. “Maybe this 25 years of democracy and liberal values in Poland is a deviant period,” he said. “Maybe now we’re returning to normal.”

The European Solidarity Center, a research institute and museum in the old Baltic city Gdansk, sits on the site of the former Lenin Shipyard. This was the birthplace of the Solidarity movement, the union of workers and intellectuals that confronted Poland’s Soviet masters starting in 1980 and ultimately filled the vacuum left by the Soviet withdrawal less than a decade later. The museum offers a vivid reminder of one of Europe’s most heroic episodes since the end of World War II, with pictures of the young protesters killed or imprisoned by the puppet regime. Toward the end of the exhibition hangs a photograph of Lech Walesa, the electrician and Solidarity co-founder who later served as Poland’s first post-communist president, and his fellow Solidarity leaders at the end of a strike at the Lenin Shipyard in 1988. On the edge of the group there are two nearly identical young men with round faces: Jaroslaw Kaczynski and his twin brother, Lech. My guide at the museum was especially eager that I understand the significance of their placement in the picture: These were marginal men, acutely aware that the glory went to others.

The Kaczynski brothers were born in Warsaw in 1949. At 12, they became famous as the adorable, mop-topped stars of a children’s film, “Those Two Who Stole the Moon.” Both received law degrees, then became caught up in history. In 1976, Jaroslaw joined the Committee for the Defense of Workers, or KOR, a group that formed in the aftermath of a government crackdown. Lech, who by chance had moved to the Gdansk region, went to work for Walesa. When, in December 1981, the Communist government declared martial law, outlawing Solidarity and imprisoning many of its leaders, the Kaczynskis continued to work underground with the union. After Walesa was released from prison, the Kaczynskis returned to his side, writing policy briefs and drafting memos on legal issues. The twins became his functionaries.

“They were useful in a support role,” Walesa told me when I met him at the office he now keeps at the Solidarity Center, “but they didn’t have the ability to be leaders themselves.” This was a view I heard from a number of Solidarity veterans: The Kaczynskis did work no one else wanted to do but never fully tasted either the suffering or the sublime romance of Solidarity. Walesa speculated that Jaroslaw’s turn against the liberal post-Communist consensus arose from “an inferiority complex,” a massive chip on Kaczynski’s shoulder.

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Law and Justice supporters marching to the Presidential Palace to mark an anniversary of the plane crash that killed, among others, Lech Kaczynski.

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“From the very beginning,” Walesa told me, “when they were kids, they used to fight, fight, fight. It’s like Romulus and Remus. They knew how to pick fights, but sometimes they chose the wrong fights.” At first, they fought for Walesa himself. Many of Solidarity’s intellectual leaders, who were steeped in the Western tradition of limited government, broke with Walesa when he ran for president, fearing that he planned to become a new autocrat. The Kaczynskis stayed by his side. Their parents had fought in the anti-Nazi, anti-Communist resistance, and the children grew up ardent patriots and conservatives.

Then an election in 1991 brought a conservative prime minister, Jan Olszewski, to power. One of the new government’s ministers, Antoni Macierewicz, claimed that dozens of members of Poland’s lower house had cooperated with the secret police; this was the same man who, a quarter of a century later, would serve as Kaczynski’s inquisitor in the audit of Civil Platform. His accusations smacked of the kind of ideological bloodletting that Solidarity’s leaders had vowed to put behind them. The Kaczynskis, however, left Walesa to join Olszewski. And when Olszewski fell, in 1992, the Kaczynskis fell with him.

In 2001, the twins began clawing their way back to the center of Polish political life with the founding of Law and Justice. The party appealed to those who felt left out of the new, cosmopolitan Poland, with its cafe culture and its easy flights to London and Frankfurt. As Europe has secularized, Poland has remained a deeply Catholic country. Poland, in short, was less liberal than it looked from the outside. In addition, many Poles were disgusted with the persistence of ex-Communists in Poland’s economic and political life, which was a consequence of the decision made by Solidarity leaders not to prosecute the apparatchiks of the old regime. In the 2005 parliamentary elections, Law and Justice narrowly edged out Civic Platform as the largest party; soon after that, Lech Kaczynski defeated Donald Tusk of Civic Platform to become president.

A very strange thing happened at the moment that Lech learned that he had been elected president. On national television, he turned to his brother and said, “Mr. Chairman, I report: Mission accomplished.” Lech was president; but Jaroslaw, the party leader, was boss. Almost everyone who knew the two was struck, first, by their near indissolubility, and second, by Lech’s deference to his brother. Walesa told me that every time he offered the twins a bonus — he couldn’t quite tell them apart — Lech would say, “Give it to my brother.”

The twins were quite different as people. Lech was a temperamental moderate who fancied himself a statesman-intellectual; Jaroslaw was the wily back-room operator. He has never lived abroad and rarely travels. Lech had a wife and child. Jaroslaw lived with his mother until her death in 2013; his only bedtime companion, he has said, is his cat, Fiona. Until recently, he had, famously, neither a bank account nor a driver’s license. His asceticism functions as a kind of charisma.

At first Jaroslaw remained in the background, but in July 2006, he took the job of prime minister for himself. Poland’s two highest officials were now twins.

That September, Jaroslaw Kaczynski delivered a little-noticed speech to the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, which in retrospect offers an invaluable guide to his worldview. The liberals who led Poland for much of the post-Soviet era, he argued, had made no effort at “changing the social hierarchy,” which remained dominated by ex-Communists. The old elite simply exchanged its former political power for wealth. How, he asked, had these despised anti-Polish elements gained the legitimacy to remain at the top rungs of Polish life? Who smoothed their way? It was “the most influential portion of the counterelite” — the liberals. They had agreed to be “co-opted to the socially privileged sphere.”

Kaczynski was claiming that his own former colleagues, the heroes of the anti-Communist struggle, who had endured isolation and prison, had secretly joined forces with the Communists and betrayed the nation. But now, he went on, a momentous reclamation had begun. Poland was witnessing the “tempestuous process of reconstructing social awareness, restoring history and exposing post-Communist legitimation myths.” A real revolution was finally supplanting a specious one.

That was Kaczynski’s view and his goal. But Law and Justice’s plans ran into resistance in Parliament and with the Constitutional Tribunal, and in 2007, the ruling right-wing coalition — of which Law and Justice was part — collapsed amid accusations of scandal. Civic Platform won the ensuing election. Poland was barely scathed by the financial crisis, and in 2011 voters awarded Civic Platform a new term. During the party’s eight years in office, Poland’s economy grew by 25 percent, one of the highest rates in Europe. Life was getting better. Tusk thought, as many intellectuals did, that after centuries of tragedy and oppression, Poland had at last sailed out into the calm waters of Francis Fukuyama’s supposed end of history. Civic Platform had little ideology beyond keeping hot water on tap, as Tusk put it.

“But he was wrong,” says Konstanty Gebert, a leading Polish journalist and intellectual. “People wanted history, they wanted glory, they wanted meaning.” In 2015, Gebert said, Law and Justice “offered a meaning. Their meaning was: ‘We’ll make Poland great again.’ ”

The strongholds of Law and Justice’s support are the economically depressed rural regions of Poland’s south and east. I spent several days in the east, which suffered deeply during both the Nazi and Soviet onslaughts and is thus not only inured to the cruelty of history but intensely nationalistic and suspicious of the outside world. In Siedlce, a modest city halfway between Warsaw and the border with Belarus, I spoke to Wojciech Kudelski, the city’s genial, elderly mayor in his office in City Hall. I asked Kudelski why he joined Law and Justice. “My family has lived in this region since the 15th century,” he replied. “We’ve fought invaders, we’ve made peace, we’ve farmed and worked.” Law and Justice stood for the true Poland. Its outlook, he said, “comes from values and rules. The rules are based in the Catholic Church.”

Siedlce has a slow and sleepy feel, perhaps because so many young people have left in recent years for England and other European destinations. Over the last six or so years, the big steel plant in town, Polimex-Mostostal, has shed half its jobs. Albert Milatti and Slawomir Szczepanik, who run the two unions at the plant, support Law and Justice and say that most of their members do as well. Both men share the party’s cranky anti-Communism, but jobs and wages are paramount for them. The average worker at the plants, they told me, earns $700 a month, with little wage growth over the years. “Right now we’re stuck in the mud,” Milatti told me. The party, he went on, “is our only hope to improve.” Both union bosses, along with many others I talked to around the region, believe that Civic Platform systematically ignored a region that gave it few votes, while Law and Justice will send investment their way.

The sense of marginalization among Law and Justice supporters has a basis in economic reality. Among the zealots, however, it feels more like a psychic condition. Zbigniew Sobolewski, a local businessman, keeps pictures of the Kaczynski twins on an office wall, where they flank a Polish eagle. When I asked him to speak of Jaroslaw, he warned me that he might get emotional, and he promptly started to tear up. “In personal relations,” he conceded, “Jaroslaw Kaczynski is not such an easy person. But he is a man who is very strict in his values. At our very first meeting” — in the early 1990s — “I knew that he was the man who could save Poland.”

When we spoke of Kaczynski’s rivals, Sobolewski’s mood blackened. He described Tusk, now the president of the European Council, as a traitor. Civic Platform, he insisted, was controlled by “the sons and daughters of those who after World War II were destroying our country.”

“You mean Communists?” I asked.

“In the broad sense, yes.”

This sort of paranoia has grown more pronounced in the Law and Justice worldview since April 10, 2010. That day, Lech Kaczynski, beginning a new campaign for president, was traveling to Smolensk in Russia with dozens of political leaders and government officials to attend an event marking the 70th anniversary of the murder of 20,000 Polish military officers by the Soviet secret police — a catastrophe that devastated Poland’s officer and intellectual class and has reminded Poles ever since of Soviet barbarity. On its descent into the airport, the delegation’s plane crashed, and all aboard were killed.

Polish and Russian investigations concluded that crew members made fatal mistakes in response to worsening weather conditions. Almost immediately, however, officials of Law and Justice cited supposed evidence that Russia had brought the plane down and that the Tusk government had conspired either in Lech’s death or in covering up Russian involvement, despite the fact that several Civic Platform officials also died in the crash. For the die-hard supporters of Law and Justice, the word “Smolensk” soon came to be shorthand for “a conspiracy so immense.” Three plaques commemorating the dead were placed in front of the Presidential Palace, which became a place of vigil for the party faithful. On the 10th of every month — not just on April 10 — Jaroslaw Kaczynski stands on the sidewalk in front of the palace to deliver a speech in honor of the dead.

All the Law and Justice supporters I met in Siedlce believed that Civic Platform had been complicit in Kaczynski’s death or at least in a Russian cover-up. Sobolewski told me of a picture of Tusk with Vladimir Putin where Tusk “seems to be expressing the feeling, ‘You see, we did it.’ ” A vast constellation of enemies was plotting against the faithful. Sobolewski gravely informed me that the brother of Adam Michnik, the great Solidarity intellectual and activist who spent years in prison for his beliefs, was a judge who “put our greatest patriots in jail” under the Communists. (Actually, it was his half brother.) Michnik is Jewish, and I asked Sobolewski if he viewed the opposition as Jewish. Siedlce and the surrounding area were among the heavily Jewish regions of Poland before the population was liquidated by the Nazis. Sobolewski said, “I would recommend that you read a book by Henry Ford: ‘The International Jew.’ He had a lot of knowledge.”

By 2015, Kaczynski was persuaded that he had become toxic in Polish politics, and so in that year’s elections he put forward as president Andrzej Duda, a law professor and former official in his brother’s government, a handsome and compliant figure. The party focused on the Polish pocketbook. In the name of increasing Poland’s dwindling population, it proposed to give parents 500 zlotys (about $130) monthly for every child beyond the first. It would reverse an increase in the retirement age and raise the ceiling below which income would not be taxed. The fact that these measures were almost certainly unaffordable didn’t make them any less popular.

In the waning days of the election, Kaczynski made a rare campaign speech, in which he warned of the dangers of the refugees then streaming toward Europe from Syria and elsewhere, “There are,” he claimed, “already signs of emergence of diseases that are highly dangerous and have not been seen in Europe for a long time: cholera on the Greek islands, dysentery in Vienna. There is also talk about other, even more severe diseases.” The speech was widely credited with helping put Law and Justice over the top. Though Poland lies far north of the route refugees take from Turkey to Europe, many Poles shared the fear of an alien Muslim presence widespread in Eastern Europe. The Civic Platform government had agreed to take 7,000 of the 160,000 refugees European officials were hoping to distribute across the continent. Law and Justice repudiated the agreement and vowed not to take a single refugee.

Though Law and Justice won only 38 percent of the popular vote, fragmentation among the other parties allowed it to gain an outright majority in Parliament. Once in office, the party moved to gain control over all those sectors that, according to Kaczynski, remained in the hands of the nomenklatura and their liberal allies, starting with the Constitutional Tribunal, which had frustrated him in his previous time in office.

The outgoing government had made appointments to replace five of the court’s 15 judges, who were scheduled to retire, a decision that was plainly unconstitutional with regard to two of the judges, whose term expired after that of the current Legislature. But the new Parliament simply invalidated all five choices and picked five new judges, which was an even more gross violation of the constitutional order. When the court refused to accept them, Duda, the president, went ahead and swore them in anyway. And that was only the beginning. In December, Parliament adopted a measure that required a two-thirds vote, rather than a majority, for binding decisions. The law also stipulated that at least 13 of the 15 judges be present to hear a case. Together, the two amendments would effectively neutralize the court.

The new government went on to eliminate the independence of Poland’s chief prosecutor, placing him underneath the minister of justice. It passed an antiterror law giving the police expanded access to digital data. An amended Civil Service law eliminated merit-based appointments for high-ranking officials, permitting them to be named by the government. Most controversial of all, a law passed in January transferred the power to pick the head of public broadcasting from a government-appointed panel to the ministry of the Treasury. The minister promptly appointed Jacek Kurski, who had once described himself as Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s “bull terrier.”

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Jaroslaw Kaczynski at a memorial service in Parliament in 2010 for victims of the plane crash in Russia that included his brother.CreditLeszek Szymanski/AFP/Getty Images

In April, the European Parliament adopted a resolution stating that Poland’s move against the independence of the Constitutional Tribunal constituted “a risk to constitutional democracy,” adding that “other issues that are of serious concern ... may constitute breaches of European law and fundamental rights.” Poland could be stripped of its vote. But such decisions must be unanimous, and Viktor Orban, Hungary’s prime minister, who has presided over a similar rollback of civil liberties in his own country, has already stated that he will defend Poland. As Adam Bodnar, Poland’s official ombudsman, puts it, “The lesson learned from Orban is not only about the weakness of European institutions but also about how you can buy time by playing with the E.U. Meanwhile, you can make systematic changes in the way the government operates. Even if you get rebuked, you can take a step back, and you’re still operating in a completely different world.” Bodnar believes that Law and Justice’s ultimate goal is to “reshape the country in terms of an authoritarian model.”

I was eager to hear Law and Justice’s views from its own officials, but that proved extremely difficult. Kaczynski rarely speaks to the Western press, and spokesmen for several senior party figures did not respond to requests for interviews. Strikingly, none of the liberal scholars and journalists I met in Warsaw had any contacts inside Law and Justice; they came from different worlds. The party spokeswoman did not respond to emails and phone calls.

Finally, however, I was able to arrange a conversation with Ryszard Terlecki, the head of the party’s parliamentary caucus and one of Kaczynski’s small circle of confidants. When we met, late on a Sunday evening in the dark and deserted Parliament building, I learned that Terlecki belonged to a political category that I had never before encountered: ex-hippie anti-Communist hard-liner. Youthful dissolution had taken its toll. At 67, Terlecki is a prematurely played-out looking man, tall and gaunt, with graven cheeks, a grizzled chin and great bags beneath dark eyes.

“I’ve always been a member of right-wing parties,” he told me. He shared Kaczynski’s conspiratorial view of recent Polish history. The post-Solidarity elite, he assured me, made common cause with the Communists “because it was the only way they could stop the conservative Catholic movement that was rising up in Poland.” Terlecki said that he was not anti-Western. The difference between Law and Justice and the opposition, he said, was that “we don’t want a Poland that is a colony of the West.” Terlecki meant not only that Poland should not blindly follow Germany, as he accused the previous government of doing, but also that Poland should embrace its own values, above all the conservatism of the church and the belief in the sanctity of the family.

It was clear that Terlecki did not accept the difference between the ruling party and the state. For him, all institutions served as instruments of power either for his side or the other, and the other side was out to harm Poland. How then, I asked, could he possibly accept the idea of political compromise? Terlecki laughed dryly. “What kind of compromise do you mean?” he asked. “There’s no need for one.”

The rise of nativist, anti-liberal parties in Poland and elsewhere and the backlash against migrants and multiculturalism in the Brexit vote raise the question of what we mean when we talk about Europe. If we mean a particular piece of geography and demography — that is, the white, Christian culture that has flourished for most of the last millennium in the continent north of the Mediterranean and west of the Black Sea — then the rise of Law and Justice and kindred parties represents no threat to Europe. But if Europe is not just a place on a map but a community of values, the home of secularism, liberalism and tolerance, the answer is much less clear. For many Law and Justice supporters, “the West” means moral nihilism. Bronislaw Wildstein, a conservative political philosopher whose writings have provided intellectual rationale for Law and Justice policies, described himself to me as an admirer of Burke who saw individuals nested inside history, tradition and culture. “Across Western Europe,” he said, “the great word is ‘emancipation’: emancipation from family identity, emancipation from sexual identity. After all this emancipation, what is left? Nothingness.”

But Solidarity’s leaders did not risk their lives and livelihoods in order to bow before the authority of the church. And those figures are not so very old today: Walesa is 73; Michnik is 70. These founding fathers have called the new government a menace to Polish democracy. A new protest movement known as KOD — a conscious echo of KOR, the pre-Solidarity intellectuals’ movement — formed last year. In early May, a demonstration called by KOD in Warsaw brought out a crowd estimated by the city’s mayor at roughly 250,000 (and by the police at 45,000).

No one mistakes KOD for Solidarity. The movement has been limited to the big cities and attracts mostly older and better-educated people. Until recently, the inroads the government made on personal freedom felt abstract to most Poles. In early October, however, an estimated 100,000 people demonstrated against a new abortion law, strongly advocated by the Catholic Church, that would have subjected doctors and women seeking abortions to potentially long prison sentences. The government abruptly withdrew its support for the legislation. Activists hope that the mass protests will fan the embers of opposition.

Michnik feels as if he has seen this drama before. He is still the publisher of Gazeta Wyborcza, the daily newspaper he founded with other Solidarity leaders in 1989. Along with Vaclav Havel, Michnik defined the meaning of the anti-Soviet uprisings both for the people of the Eastern bloc and for readers in the West. Michnik stressed the idea that Solidarity must function not simply as an instrument for organization and negotiation but as an embodiment of another, better way to live: egalitarian, truthful, free from fear. He spent years in prison for his beliefs.

“The great objective of this government is to reorganize Poland into a Putin-like system,” Michnik told me when we met at the newspaper’s office. “There will be some democratic trappings left behind to appeal to those concerned about democracy, but at its core, it will be Putinism.” Michnik fears that the justice minister, Zbigniew Ziobro, a member of the Kaczynski inner circle, could open criminal investigations of leading members of the opposition. Even the threat of such a process, he says, might intimidate lawmakers into falling in line on important votes.

The veterans of Solidarity have learned to trust the Polish people in a crisis. Eventually, say Michnik and others, people will awaken to the threat that the Law and Justice government poses to the liberties for which Poles began fighting four decades ago. But what is “eventually”? What transgression would trigger a truly national response? How much damage would be done to Polish democracy in the meantime? “One thing is obvious,” Michnik said. “Behind us is a wall, and we see inscribed on that wall the specter of dictatorship. We cannot go back.”

James Traub is a columnist and contributor at foreignpolicy.com. His latest book is “John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit.”

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